http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
YOU'VE got to give Mickey Mouse his due. Sometimes
mickeymouse is too much even for Mickey.

When David Westin, the
lawyer in charge of ABC News,
delivered a little homily on
journalism ethics the other day in
which he said he couldn't really say
whether the terrorist attack on the
Pentagon was morally wrong,
Mickey hit the roof. Or whatever it
is that a mouse hits when he gets
mad.

Executives at Disney, which
owns ABC-TV and a lot of other
media stuff, told Mr. Westin to
apologize. They get it, even if Mr.
Westin does not. So he
apologized, sort of. Not under
pressure, of course; he intended to
apologize all along. The apology
was the usual
sorry-if-I-did-any-harm apology,
suggesting that he doesn't really
understand what upset Mickey
and probably doesn't care.

What upset Mickey and the
Disney executives was that when a student at a seminar at the
Columbia University School of Journalism asked whether the
Pentagon was a legitimate target for terrorists, Mr. Westin
replied with a mouthful of heartfelt moonshine: "I actually
don't have an opinion on that and it's important I not have an
opinion on that as I sit here in my capacity right now. The
way I conceive my job running a news organization, and the
way I would like all journalists at ABC News to perceive it,
is [that] there is a big difference between a normative position
and a positive position.

Our job is to determine what is, not
what ought to be and when we get into the job of what ought
to be I think we're not doing a service to the American
people for me to take a position [on whether] this was right
or wrong, I mean, perhaps for me in my private life, perhaps
it's for me dealing with my loved ones, perhaps it's for my
minister at church. But as a journalist I feel strongly that's
something that I should not be taking a position on."

It's not difficult to understand how the president of a
network news organization could say something as goofy as
this (no offense intended to Mickey's pal, Goofy). Some men
are of such extraordinary refinement and sensibility that they
don't think and feel the things real people do. Most men, for
example, would not say that murder - which is what the
terrorists inflicted in wholesale numbers on September 11 -
is something that could be right or wrong, who knows which,
or that murder and mayhem would "perhaps" be wrong "with
my loved ones." Pity poor Mrs. Westin, if there is one, at 3
o'clock in the morning with an intruder in the Westin house:
"Umm, uh, dear, this man is a rapist and he insists on raping
you and maybe even killing you, and perhaps I shouldn't
interfere since I'm, er, ah, a journalist, and for me to take a
positive position rather than a normative position on this
would perhaps not be doing a service to you and to the
American people, so I will continue to sit on my capacity ")

Of course, David Westin is not a journalist at all. He never
has been, not even a television journalist, and as anyone at
ABC News could tell you, he wouldn't know how to get off
his ample capacity to cover a grass fire. He's a lawyer, not a
journalist, which is a very different kind of public enemy. He
probably thinks this is the way celebrity journalists are
supposed to talk, remembering how Peter Jennings and Mike
Wallace, on a similar occasion a decade ago, insisted that if
they were accompanying enemy soldiers and learned of an
imminent attack on American positions they wouldn't warn
the Americans even if they could. The code of journalists is a
strict one.

These are tough times for the ladies and gents of
Entertainment News, with a war already more than a month
old and no villains to drag on camera. The distant bang-bang
is getting old, and so far there's not even an American
atrocity. Vietnam was better than this. Donald Rumsfeld, the
secretary of defense, actually took this question at a briefing
earlier this week: "What can the Pentagon do to keep the
American public engaged in this [so] that a certain amount of
boredom doesn't set in, as with Iraq? You know, every now
and then we'd go and we'd bomb a little something, and
everybody yawned. Unless there's a bombing here [in the
United States] every month, how do we really keep the
public engaged?"

The reporter's complaint seemed to be aimed more at
Osama bin Laden than at Mr. Rumsfeld. We keep getting
warnings and nothing happens. The anthrax story is dying:
good news is no news. Besides, it's hard to get good film of
people lying in a hospital, struggling to fight off disease. What
TV news needs is a reprise of September 11; maybe, as the
FBI and Gov. Gray Davis of California suggested last night,
an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge. That would get
everybody off their capacities, maybe for a whole
week.